Study On Marketing Channel Optimization Strategy In Container Shipping Industry

Container shipping liner company now is facing a serious product homogeneityproblem. It is attributed to standard container transportation service offered by all the linercompanies, as well as their overlap lines. Container shipping is a capital-intensive industry,week liner business model makes it have the characteristics of high-risk. In such anindustry, if company wants to get the survival and development of the company, loadingrate will be the critical. How to succeed in selling space within a short time has been theissue that many carriers most concern about. However, in the marketing process, what themost of liner companies consider firstly is reducing the sale rate. They spent enormousenergy in price war, whereas, they put less investment into building and nurturing theirmarketing channel. Only when the tariffs are reduced to the bottom line, and becomeunprofitable, the marketing channel, which is the crucial external resource of enterprises, isable to be refocused by the liner companies.Nowadays, marketing environment of shipping industry has become both increasingopen and intensive competition. Like other container shipping companies, P Company hasalready realized its long-term survival and development are depended on the performancethey organize and operate the marketing channel system. Properly managing the channelsystem will be the key to gain a competitive advantage. Today, Price, Product and Servicestend to be similar, only distribution channel is unable to be easily imitated and copied.How to set up an efficient channel, which Channel strategy should be adopted, and how tosolve the sales problem, such as high agent cost in current and no perfection of the channelsystem, has been P Company’s focus of channel management.This thesis is based on the related theory of marketing channels, and takes P Companyfor researching example. Firstly, it will use both PEST and Five Force Model as theanalysis tool to analyze the competitive environment of P Company, then, it will quarry thedefects in P Company’s existing marketing channels proceeded from the followingaspects—channel structure, channel member selection and channel control. Afterwards, according to the channel optimization theory, and combined with the actual developmentof P Company actual development needs, it will design several optimization solutions,such as resetting channel structure on the marketing channel; quantifying selection criteriaof the channel member; and strengthening the control of marketing channel.It is unable to foresee the market position of P Company’s in the container shippingindustry in the future, but I still hope it can make P Company achieve great progress in thefuture path of development, also it can be benefit to other enterprise, whatever it belongs ornot belongs to this industry, in the choice of channel strategy.